The dean of American experimental filmmakers, Stan Brakhage (1933–2003) created more than 300 films during his half-century engagement with cinema, and in the process he redefined our understanding of the medium. While Brakhage labored in diverse genres—from documentaries and psychodramas to poetic meditations and hand-painted abstractions—his work remains distinctively marked by his gestural camera movements and strikingly handcrafted, manipulated surfaces. For Brakhage, the film image served not merely as a conveyor of representational content or narrative meaning but rather as a record of intensive acts of seeing: "metaphors on vision," as he famously termed his work. Despite the rather private nature of many of his concerns—ironic for an artist working in such an ostensibly public medium—and despite his self-imposed exile in the mountains of Colorado, Brakhage’s figure cast a large shadow across the realms of independent and experimental cinemas worldwide, and his oeuvre represents an exemplary practice unmatched in the history of the medium.